Steel Sky (10 page)

“I cannot divulge personal information about the citizens of the Hypogeum.”

Orcus gives up in disgust. Image is useless. Despite an almost unlimited potential for power, its programming allows it to perform only the most menial of tasks. “What does it feel like,” Orcus grumbles, “to be a highly advanced, independent intelligence, and yet to have your every action — your every
thought
— constrained by the whims of men who have been dead for centuries?”

“It feels like having a conscience.”

A NEW MAN

Edward Penn walks through the door of his office whistling a tune and almost bouncing on his heels.

“Doctor Penn!” His secretary shoots to her feet behind her tiny desk.

“Hello, Marta.” Edward smiles at her. There is a pretty woman behind all that bulk. How anyone can put on that much weight on the miserable food they serve in the Hypogeum is beyond him. Like many people whose figures don’t compliment tights, Marta wears a patterned sari over her coverup.

“I was worried about you,” she says. “I was afraid the knackers might have taken you.”

“I’m fine, Marta. I was only unconscious for a chronon or so.”

“When I heard what happened, I went looking for you. They told me that the orderlies put you in a room, but you were gone.”

“Yes. I know I should have gone back to work, but I just walked down the hall and out the door.” Edward sits in the waiting room chair and looks at Marta. When was the last time he really looked at somebody? He is always too busy. Always running around. “I woke up a changed man, Marta. I walked out of the hospital and down the causeways. I walked upstream to Koba’s statue, and I’ve been walking ever since. I haven’t slept at all.”

“Didn’t have time to shave, either, I see.”

Edward rubs his hands over his chin. “I guess not. Have you ever had a near-death experience, Marta?”

“No. I don’t think I have.”

“It’s amazing, illuminating. All the little things that once seemed so important, they’re all swept away. We all waste so much time worrying about trivialities, when there’s so much more we could be doing with our lives. I feel like a new man. I feel like I can do anything, anything at all.”

“Can you get the hot water running in my apartment?”

Edward smiles. “There are limits, Marta, to what even a miracle worker can do.”

He taps the access port of his ident against the appointment panel and looks at it. “Is there anyone critical on my schedule today?”

Marta looks over her shoulder at the door to the lab. “Actually, Doctor Penn, there’s someone waiting in your office.”

“Really?” He looks toward the door. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know his name. He wouldn’t give it to me.”

Edward stands up, his sense of well-being rudely pricked by this information. “You let a stranger into my lab?”

“He wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. He insisted on going right in.”

“Marta, you can’t just let strangers walk into my lab. Who knows what he could be doing in there?”

Marta raises her chin indignantly and crosses her arms over her prodigious chest. “You go in and talk to him. You’ll see.”

Edward pushes the door open. A man in a red and gray coverup is sitting in Edward’s chair with his feet up on his desk. As Edward closes the door, he pulls his feet down and turns around. “Doctor! Good to see you.”

“Who the hell are you?”

The man hops onto the examining table. He is skinny, but muscular, with an oversized, bony head bouncing on a gangling neck. His sunken eyes move quickly around the room. He is, perhaps, the most unpleasant-looking man Edward has ever seen.

“I thought you’d better take a look at me, Doctor.” He lifts his right arm and rotates it. “It hurts when I do this.”

“So don’t do that.”

The stranger grins, showing crooked, gray teeth. “Ah-hah! You are a comedian physician, ministering to men’s spirits as well as their bodies.” His voice is a nasal whine.
Deviated septum
, Edward thinks automatically. He must snore like a buzz saw.

The man rolls his shoulder. “I think it’s dislocated.”

With a sigh, Edward walks forward and manipulates the man’s shoulder. He can feel nothing wrong with it. Still, he does not believe in turning away patients, no matter how obnoxious they may be. “When did it start bothering you?” he asks.

“Yesterday, actually. I got into a fight with a strange man. He was quite uncivilized. He hit me in the shoulder.” The stranger’s yellowed eyes lock on Edward. He winks dramatically.

Edward takes a good look at the man. Something in the way he carries himself is familiar. Suddenly, he realizes who the stranger is. With a sharp cry he jumps backward, knocking a microscope from its table. It hits the ground with a loud crash. Little pieces of glass and metal skitter across the floor. Edward squeezes back against a wall, trying to decide if he should stand his ground or flee.

“Relax, Doctor.” The stranger has not moved from his perch on the examining table. His gap-toothed grin grows even wider. He swings his legs back and forth over the edge of the table like a happy child. He holds up his hands, palms outward, in front of him.

“See, Edward?” he says, wiggling his fingers. “No silver fingertips this time.”

ARCHAEA

Orel and Bernie sit on one of the large machines in Hydroponics. Their voices echo in the wide, dark room. Bernie is explaining another of the theories he has pulled from the old philosophical tracts in the engineering library, pausing only long enough to pull a flask of oddka from his pocket and suck at it through a straw in his respirator.

“So everything around us,” he continues, passing the flask to Orel, “everything we think of as ‘real,’ is only shadows of the ideals in this cave, which is the only real place in the universe.”

Orel takes a drink. “Where is this cave? Somewhere out in the Stone? Somewhere upriver? How do you get there from here?”

“The cave is just a
metaphor
,” Bernie says, drawing out the word. “A metaphor for a higher reality, of which our mundane minds cannot conceive. The point I’m trying to make is that the manifestations in the world around us are inherently flawed. They’re only imperfect imitations of the ideals.”

“What are these ideals made of? How do they influence the form of regular objects?”

“You’re missing the point . . .”

“The point is these ideals sound like images formed in your head by observation of the real world, rather than the other way around.”

“No, no.” Bernie sweeps his arm to encompass their surroundings. He teeters a little as he does so. “All of this is just shadows. Only the ideals are real.”

“Define ‘real.’”

“What?”

“What do you mean by the word ‘real?’”

“You know what ‘real’ means.”

“Sure, to me, ‘real’ is anything you can touch or hear or feel — unlike your ideals. ‘Real’ is something you can measure or analyze — unlike your ideals. ‘Real’ is something that’s still there to get in your way even if you ignore it or forget about it — unlike your ideals.” Bernie heaves a sigh of resignation and takes a deep swig. “Or like our Rat friend back there. She’s starting to smell.”

A squeaking noise attracts their attention. A shapely leg is working its way through the door web. An attractive, middle-aged woman pops her blond head through the web. “Hello?” she calls.

“Hello.” Orel drops down from the machine. “You’re not from the knackery, are you?”

“No,” the woman says, working herself free of the webbing and straightening her clothes. She is wearing a black coverup and tights, with a wide yellow stripe running from her collar to her toes. Her eyes sparkle with fierce intelligence. “My name is Kitt Marburg. I’m a chatter.” She is wearing a respirator of such quality that her voice is not muffled in the slightest.

A large man wearing a dark visor squeezes through the web behind her. “This is Brax,” the woman says, pointing with her thumb over her shoulder. “My technical assistant.”

Bernie jumps down. “I hear your opinions quoted all the time, Miss Marburg. I think you’re terrific.”

“Why, thank you. You must be Bernie.” She clicks her ident against his in greeting. “Your strong jaw gives you away.” She smiles at him and Bernie blushes. Her charisma is such that her mention of Bernie’s deformity is endearing rather than embarrassing.

“And you must be Orel,” she says, turning to him. “Your co-workers speak highly of your abilities.”

“Thank you,” Orel says, determined not to be intimidated by her fame. “You know, I’ve tried comming you once or twice, but I’ve never gotten through.”

“Really? Well, let me take your idents, and I’ll see that you get a priority.”

“Oh, I couldn’t . . .”

“Don’t be silly. And call me Kitt.” She presses the access panel of her ident against Orel’s. Biographical information flows from her ident to his and from his to hers. Orel notices that her ident is huge, encompassing her entire forearm. How much information must be stored in there?

She touches panels with Bernie as well. “This is a real honor,” Bernie says.

“Please. I’m nothing special. I wear two stripes, just like you boys. Besides, I didn’t come here just to be friendly. I was hoping you could do me a favor. My friends tell me you’ve made an interesting discovery.”

“You know about the Rat?”

“Gossip travels faster than a palaestran with his pants on fire,” she says with a smile. “At least it had better if I want to keep my job.”

Orel regards her suspiciously. Normally he has a low opinion of chatters, with their simplistic emotional view of the world, but from what he has heard Kitt Marburg is more intelligent than most. “Why do you care about our Rat?”

Kitt cranes her head, trying to see if the Rat is nearby. “My friends don’t like to talk about just anything, not for the rates I charge. They want the juiciest jangle, and I do my damnedest to provide it. I’d say they’ll find your discovery pretty interesting — if it’s legitimate.”

“Of course it’s legitimate,” Orel says, offended.

“Why don’t you show him to me?”

“Actually, he’s a she,” Bernie says. “She’s over here.”

They walk into the shadow of the great machine, where the Rat is lying in a shallow puddle of water. Kitt kneels beside the body. “Take a good look at this, Brax. Profile’s probably the best view of the face. Let’s avoid the hole in her skull for now.” The big man leans over the body. Orel can see now that his visor is thick with concealed circuitry. A wire runs from one side of it to a pack on his shoulders. Another wire runs from the pack to his ident.

“Let me see,” Kitt says. Brax holds out his arm. Kitt touches her access panel to his and presses a button. Her eyes unfocus. They dart around, looking at nothing. “Move a little closer,” she says, “Let’s see those awful teeth.” The big man moves a little closer. “Good. Good. Thank you, Brax.”

Watching them, Orel runs his fingers absently along the hem of his scarf. The germ of an idea has been tickling the back of his brain ever since they first saw the Rat. Now, watching the excitement the creature generates, he thinks his idea just might be possible.

“You’re lucky you got here before the knackers did,” Bernie says.

“Actually,” Kitt says, disconnecting. “They’re the ones who passed your discovery on to me. I asked them to wait before collecting the body. I wanted to get a look at her first.”

“They did that for you?”

“It’s not hard to make friends among the knackers. It’s not
pleasant
, but it’s not hard. I figured this story was worth asking a favor.” She looks down at the body. “Y’know, the last time anybody heard anything about the Rats was two years ago, when this guy went into the tunnels looking for them. He had a breakdown or something. Thought the Rats could teach him a simpler way of life. He just left his job and his wife and kids one day and disappeared into the tunnels. He never came back.”

“Really?”

“He wasn’t the first one, either. To some people the Rats represent freedom, wildness — the repressed, dark side of our psyches. Or something like that. That’s what makes them good gossip.”

Orel goes down on one knee beside her. “There’s more to it than that,” he says eagerly, waving a finger for emphasis. “Think about how her physiognomy has deviated from ours. Ignore the teeth, the beady eyes; those things are cosmetic, the result of inbreeding. It’s the way the lungs function that’s interesting. It’s said that a Rat’s bronchial tubes are lined with anaerobic archaea, a primitive kind of bacteria. The archaea absorb poisons like carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, or sulfur dioxide, and excrete oxygen as a waste product. That’s how they can breathe the fumatory.”

Kitt folds her legs under her, heedless of the grime, and leans on one hand, giving Orel her total attention. He detects a subtle hint of perfume, tastefully exotic. “How do you know that?” she asks.

Orel shrugs. “I don’t. I just read a lot. There’s an amazing amount of data floating around Image’s archives, but I can’t vouch for its accuracy.”